Shanghai spectacular
It’s graduation season, which marks a turning point in life for many college students. The ceremonies are affairs to remember for the rest of their lives — for the celebrants, as well as for all those who witness the spectacle.
Cities, too, have graduations. After years of preparation, growth, traffic jams, and the cramming of people into denser and denser communities, many cities overcome all odds to emerge with flying colors. Cities celebrate this moment with affairs to remember, or rather, international fairs to remember.
I visited one such city last week, which was preparing to graduate into the elite circle of urban capitals of the world. Shanghai has been in the forefront of China’s long march to modernity. It was a cosmopolitan trendsetter in its pre-war years, but that was its adolescence. The city has gone through rough spots, but it has endured, matured, and re-emerged in the 21st century as a global nexus. Today, it attracts investments and visitors, like the lightning that strikes its ever-increasing number of skyscrapers.
Twice the size of Manila with twice the population, Shanghai has re-defined big, fast, and frenzied in terms of urban growth. It epitomizes the new type of metropolis today — those that defy the classic corrective of decentralization of population centers to achieve economic growth. Shanghai celebrates concentration instead, and the focusing of development within a contained site, maximizing opportunities for enterprise, employment, and excitement for tens of millions. Shanghai has proven this new paradigm by having one of largest number of Chinese millionaires and billionaires in the country.
Two years ago, China celebrated its geo-political coming of age with an Olympics in Beijing. This year it is celebrating its urban-economic (urbanomic?) coming of age with a world’s fair — Shanghai Expo 2010.
The practice started in London, England in the mid-19th century with exhibits of manufactured goods and culture, in numerous gigantic pavilions fashioned out of the most modern new building technologies then — iron and glass. The fairs proved popular with investors as well as the public, who came by the millions. By the 20th century, international fairs or expositions were regularly hosted by European cities, and then by American cities — New York even hosted two, in 1939 and 1964 — remember the Salakot Pavilion of the Philippines?
The last big world’s fair was held in Osaka in 1970, which had Leandro Locsin’s elegant “shell” pavilion. It was a huge success and attracted over 60 million visitors.
The fair’s architectural fantasies and fantastic urban landscape setting were a hard act to follow. In fact, no one did, at least not for the rest of the 20th century. That period also marked a period where metropolises lost out to suburbia and “fringe cities” with their corporate campuses and beltway networks.
The last two decades have changed the way we look at cities, and cities, since the late ’80s, have evolved in the way they look and function. These urban changes have not been more drastic than in Asian cities. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Bangkok, and Shanghai are redefining or attempting to redefine how cities grow and how people in them cope with these new, denser and more demanding environments.
Some cities are successful and some are not, or rather, all are successful in some areas while other problems persist — crime, pollution, and the lack of housing for all. Shanghai has arguably made the most progress but paid a price in getting to where it is now.
What Shanghai and its authorities are aiming for now is to improve the lives of its citizens — by urban infill projects (maximizing inner city districts), improved pedestrian and transport systems (maglev trains, subway extensions and people-friendly sidewalks and parks, brown field development (the re-purposing of derelict districts of the city into vibrant new mixed-use communities).
Shanghai chose to celebrate its coming-of-age with an international expo, at a site where these three cutting-edge urban initiatives are applied with a vengeance. The failure of expos after Osaka’s was in the financial disasters of holding them — they cost too much and their sites were never fully integrated into the urban fabric after the fair’s gates closed, many became white elephants that slowly crumbled to ruin.
Shanghai close to redevelop derelict riverside land, upriver from the Bund, into what will become a new 528-hectare mixed-use district. But for the next six months it will be the center of the universe — the site of the world’s largest expo designed to hopefully draw a hundred million people to enjoy its varied and variegated sights and sounds.
Imagine a site as large as 10 Lunetas, or over 20 SM Malls of Asia. Then fill it with close to 192 country pavilions, 50 corporate or institutional pavilions, and intersperse it with over two dozen huge plazas and landscaped parks.
That’s the Shanghai Expo 2010.
The Expo’s theme is “Better City — Better Life.” The sub-theme is, of course, the default theme of anything these days — green. Greenness and sustainability is, of course, part and parcel of quality of life (for all species) worldwide. I’ll write soon about all this greenness and much of the faux greenness being bandied about by everyone.
The Philippine participation is not small in this important event. We are inevitably drawn forward in the wake of the giant that is China. Culturally we trace major roots to Chinese culture, with many of us descendants of hua-ren, immigrants from there who formed the first OFWs.
The Philippine pavilion is the largest in our recent history of participation in these events. At 2,000 square meters, fancy design meister Ed Calma, under the conceptual direction of the belligerently creative Marian Pastor, created an out-of-the-box pavilion housed in a box-like structure.
The Philippine theme is “Performing Cities” (performance here being in both the sense of production of goods and services of value in our cities and the cultural performances or expressions that are embedded in our very — now more urban — soul).
The dominant graphic theme outside is hands. Philippine products, intellectual or physically manufactured, are the product of our manual and mental dexterity. The façade, which glows in the dark, is filled with images of Pinoy hands at work and play — holding a microphone, a microchip, a pen, or protected by a boxing glove.
Inside, visitors are offered a plethora of stimuli — all produced by Filipino hands — music, handicrafts, fabric, fashion accessories, and food (served by the chic Travel Café). World-renowned Filipino performing artists have been tapped to spice up the experience of the pavilion.
Just as importantly, the Philippine participation involves a series of public forums on cities, urban development, urban planning and design, housing, parks and relevant issues in an ever-urbanizing world.
I attended the first of such forum last week, just as the Expo had its final dry run. Vice President Noli de Castro gave a keynote speech on public housing and cities at the forum, which also marked the inauguration of the Philippine participation at the expo. A session followed with key speakers that included former DENR Secretary and sustainability-champion Bebet Gozum, three-termer uber-urban-performer Mayor Freddie Tinga of Taguig, and urban planner and scholar Dr. Art Corpuz, president of the Philippine Economic Society.
I will follow up with an article in the near future with the contents of this first forum and succeeding ones with various topics according to the expo theme (future speaker will be GK honcho Tony Meloto, among others).
In the meanwhile, I suggest you all make plans to visit Shanghai and its spectacular expo (PAL has a great expo package). Allow for a few days’ stay, bring comfortable shoes, a camera with big storage capacity and an open mind to be able to absorb Shanghai’s presentation of our urban futures.
All graduates look forward to their future. Shanghai has painted a bright and vibrant one for itself. We can only hope that we, in Philippine cities, graduate soon.
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Many thanks to Ambassador Rosario Manalo, Ime Sarmiento, Marian Pastor and the rest of the officers and staff of the organizing committee and the Philippine delegation. Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.
